In a 22-year old interview now published by Harper’s Bazaar, one of President Richard Nixon‘s key advisors and central figure in the Watergate scandal admitted the United States’ “War on Drugs” was really a targeted war on Blacks and Hippies.
It was Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman who once sat down with Dan Baum as he unveiled the true motivations behind Nixon’s first piece of legislation.
Baum’s article begins with an encounter he has with Ehrlichman in Atlanta during 1994 at an engineering firm. Baum was researching drug prohibition politics for his 1996 book, Smoke and Mirrors.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The stereotypes associated with Blacks and drugs weren’t incidental after all. Go figure. But, did we need Ehrlichman to tell us what we’ve already witnessed?
The criminalization of drugs in the United States has led to massive repercussions, included terrifying numbers of Americans, namely minorities, being incarcerated at alarming rates. We’ve seen demand for products outside of the United States increase, bringing deadly consequences in foreign countries.
Ehrlichman passed in 1999, and his children question the validity of Baum’s account, stating their father never spoke ill of people of color.
“The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him.”
The question on why Dan Baum chose to bring forth this quote now was raised, the author responded that it was a facet he forgot about until he stumbled upon it while searching through old notes for the piece in Harper’s Bazaar, a much broader writing on the decriminalization of drugs titled “Legalize It All.”
Baum told CNN, “I think Ehrlichman was waiting for someone to come and ask him. I think he felt bad about it. I think he had a lot to feel bad about.”
